What's Best Practice for Getting Rid of Guest Host OS?

Hi All

I want to get rid of an OS and do a a fresh reinstall.



I use Sun Microsystems Virtual Box v3.02.

What the best way to do this?

Just delete and reinstall?

Or do I reformat?

Or completely get rid of the Virtual HD and do a reinstall that way?


What would net me the fastest new reinstalled OS?

Well, with a virtual machine...the entire hard drive contents are stored in a virtual hard drive file. With most desktop virtualization the file starts out small and can grow to a maximum size.

Thus, I would go into the virtual machine settings, edit the hardware and choose to remove the hard drive and delete the hard drive file. Then simply add a hard drive back and boot the machine with bootable install media and reinstall the OS.

If you are not doing it already, you can edit the cdrom settings on the virtual machine to mount and ISO file. Therefore, you can install from an ISO file on the hard drive rather than from a physical CDROM/DVDROM. So, this can speed up the reinstall pretty significantly.

Thanks pparks

Yes I use a mounted iso file to load the OS

Hi all
In Vmware there's also another way of getting rid of an entire guest OS

When you open the virtual machine image you can before powering it on select in one of the menu options "Delete from Disk". - If you do this ensure you are deleting the correct VM as there's no "Are you sure" type of prompt.

Virtual box *might* have something similar.

Cheers
jimbo